TechCrunch Startup News

Alation, a startup that helps crawl a company’s databases in order to build a data search catalogue, announced a $50 million Series C investment today. The round was led by Sapphire Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors Costanoa Ventures, DCVC (Data Collective), Harmony Partners and Icon Venturesalso participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $82 million, according to Crunchbase data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Slack is losing its chief product officer April Underwood ahead of a direct listing expected in 2019. Tamar Yehoshua, a long-time Google vice president, has been tapped to fill Underwood’s shoes as Slack’s new product chief. Underwood joined Slack, the provider of workplace communication tools, in 2015 as its head of platform after a five-year stint as Twitter’s director of product. She was promoted to the chief product role about 10 months ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Squad could be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of punctuating video chat might make it the teen girl “third place” like Fortnite is for adolescent boys. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Similar to Y Combinator, early-stage technology startup accelerator Techstars has spent much of the last decade supporting and seeding innovative projects, including Plated, ClassPass, SendGrid and PillPack. Now, it wants to take its service a step further. Today, Techstars is announcing the launch of Techstars Studio, a new venture that will have the accelerator developing and launching venture-scale businesses with the support of several corporate partners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The popular image of a Chapter 7 bankruptcy might be a large company like Enron failing, or maybe some lazy drifter trying to shirk their financial responsibilities. The reality is anything but those sorts of images. Today in America, the most common reason for bankruptcy is to discharge egregious sums of medical debt [1], which might have been incurred in a short stint in a hospital emergency room. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For decades, women in business have lacked the resources necessary to navigate to or sustain executive roles. Finally, venture-funded projects have emerged to fill this gap. The latest is Chief, a private network for New York-based women in senior roles intech, retail, enterprise, finance, media and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Home trade-in platform Knock has brought in a $400 million investment to accelerate a national expansion and double its 100-person headcount. Foundry Group has led the Series B funding round in New York-based Knock, with participation from Company Ventures and existing investors RRE Ventures, Corazon Capital, WTI and FJ Labs .Knock co-founder and chief executive officer Sean Black declined to disclose the startup’s valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Microsoft Bing not only shows child pornography, it suggests it A TechCrunch-commissioned report has found damning evidence on Microsoft’s search engine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The government shutdown entered its 21st day on Friday, upping concerns of potentially long-lasting impacts on the U.S. stock market. Private market investors around the country applauded when Uberfinallyfiled documents with the SEC to go public. Others were giddy to hear Lyft, Pinterest, Postmates and Slack (via a direct listing, according to the latest reports) were likely to IPO in 2019, too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After weeks teasing renderings and production photos, Elon Musk finally showed off the finished Starship test rocket last night. Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering. pic.twitter.com/k1HkueoXaz — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019 As you can well see, the Starship test rocket has a stainless steel skin, which had a few people scratching their heads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices